Author | Fan Deng Reading · On the string
Anchor | Fan Deng Reading · Fu Xiaomi
Interpret the trailer
Meet · Meet your unknown self in the book.
Good evening to all book lovers, welcome to the reading column "Encounter" produced by Fan Deng Reading.
In 2002, when the Chinese Literature and Media Awards presented the Outstanding Achievement Award of the Year to Stetson,
He once commented: "Shi Tiesheng is one of the most admired writers in contemporary China. ”
He claimed that his main business was to be sick and write something in his spare time.
Today I would like to share with you Shi Tiesheng's prose masterpiece , "Me and the Temple of Earth".
Even if the wings are broken, the heart will fly.
Some people say that if you think life is too difficult, then read "Me and the Temple of Earth".
In the book, Stetson tells the story of his own life at a prosperous age, but he was accidentally paralyzed in bed, and he almost wanted to commit suicide in despair, but finally realized self-healing and redemption step by step in literature and writing.
Fate trapped his young body in a wheelchair, but his soul grew stronger over the long years.
The writer Han Shaogong once commented:
"I thought that even if the 1991 novel was only his article 'Me and the Temple of Earth', it could be said to be a good year."
In "Me and the Temple of Earth", Shi Tiesheng used his most mutilated body to write the most abundant thoughts and the most moving words.
As soon as it was published, it attracted countless letters from readers saying that they were deeply shocked.
There are also some people who are suffering from illness, in which they get spiritual comfort and rekindle their hopes for life.
Even though life is a bitter sea, he still uses fighting spirit as the sail and words as the oar to seek direction in this bitter sea.
I believe that everyone who has read "Me and the Temple of Earth" has been touched by the tenacity and indomitability between the lines in the book:
There is no one whose life is not hard, but self-crossing is the best antidote.
Encounter difficulties and learn to be silent
When Stetson was twenty-one years old, bad luck suddenly came.
He could no longer stand on his legs and was admitted to Friendship Hospital.
He was full of anticipation, thinking that after ten days, a month, or at most three months, he would be back to normal.
But three months passed, and instead of being discharged from the hospital, he became more seriously ill.
In the first days, he was painful and anxious.
He asked the doctor over and over again, "Can my illness get better?" ”
After not getting an answer, he began to pin his hopes on God, writing "God bless" everywhere with his eyes.
Countless times, he prayed that if God did not let him die, he would be left with legs that could walk normally.
But all hopes were dashed over time, and he began to become more and more anxious.
He rejected his mother's concerns, cold and grumpy.
Disheartened, Stetson even found a wall, and he shouted at the wall, resenting the injustice of fate.
But everything was useless, he still couldn't get up, and the day he was discharged from the hospital became the day he officially got into a wheelchair.
After being discharged from the hospital, he could not find a job, could not find a way out, and at one point thought of death.
It was during this "death-seeking" period that he began his relationship with the Temple of Earth.
He often went to the garden alone to meditate, observing the grass and trees, observing insects, and thinking about the meaning of life in heaven and earth.
He saw the eternal sunset in the stone door of the altar, saw the dark cypress, and saw the grass and trees in the garden growing vigorously and endlessly.
All this made him feel the reality of life, the smallness of the individual.
He suddenly realized that death is a matter that does not have to be rushed, and that life should be considered as to how to live.
Slowly, it seemed that the dead end of the road that could not be walked gradually had an exit.
He sometimes looked at all kinds of people in the garden and guessed what kind of life they had.
Sometimes I hold a book under a tree and experience the world in a book.
In such a silent introspection, his heart gradually calmed down and began to create.
Writing slowly became an outlet for him to get out of despair, allowing him to see the dawn of the future.
Nietzsche once said:
"Whoever will eventually shake the earth will be silent for a long time."
Deep in the trough, complaining is noise, resentment is consumption.
Only by being silent can we return from the complicated world to the corner of our own soul and find the support point of life.
People are at a low point, in time to return to zero
Stetson's fate with the Temple of Earth runs through the whole process, from youth to middle age.
He once recalled in "Me and the Temple of Earth" that in fifteen years, who insisted on coming to the garden.
Among them, there is a beautiful and unfortunate girl.
When he first saw her, she was only three years old, crouching on the road to pick up the yellow flower "little lantern" that had fallen from the tree, innocent and beautiful.
A few years later, during a season when "little lanterns" were falling, Stetson saw the girl again and found that she was being teased by several people.
Only then did Stetson know that the girl was mentally handicapped.
He also has a friend who is good at running, who has been running hard for decades but is lonely and nameless, and every time he passes by the award.
And when the friend played for the last time and broke the record at the age of thirty-eight, the coach said, "If only I had found you ten years ago." ”
Fate is like this, sprinkling some suffering and injustice on the human world at will.
And who bears these sufferings seems to be left to chance.
When you encounter it, you have to accept it and go all out to survive.
It doesn't matter what you lose, everyone loses, the key is how to try to get something.
So Stetson began to re-understand himself, taking the past twenty years as a gift, no longer nostalgic and no longer regretful.
He no longer clings to the suffering of disability, returns to zero, and starts again.
He told himself that the chance of survival was rare, so why not try hard and explore the possibilities of life again.
So he took a pen and paper to one of the least disturbed corners of the garden and secretly wrote.
He even had a magic spell for writing, always looking for inspiration and materials, and his life was enriched again.
After the publication of his works, he felt more and more the joy of achievement and the "sense of value".
Writer Liu Zhenyun also said:
"The zero mentality is the mentality of emptying everything in one's mind, stripping away everything you already have, and returning everything to zero."
Only by zeroing out the past can a new life come.
If you are too attached to the past, you will be wrapped in distractions, stuck in your own ways, and wandering in place.
Only by letting go of everything can we embrace the new possibilities of life.
Firm faith, the courage to break the situation
Stetson once said that literature saved him.
And now we see that it is precisely because of Shi Tiesheng that literature has become more brilliant.
His works became classics and encouraged countless people.
But When Stetson first became acquainted with literature, it was by chance.
Stetson once said that in the days when he first learned that his legs were crippled, he thought of death countless times.
And he didn't die for one important reason:
One day, the doctor told him to read books on the day of hospitalization and not to live in vain on any day of life.
This incident had a great impact on him in the future, and inadvertently pointed out a path for him.
After the hospitalization, he insisted on reading books and insisting on creating.
Writing has also become his belief in life, allowing him to move from the barren real world to the fertile soil of literature.
If you say, the initial move toward literature is just to find a reason not to commit suicide.
Then the next thing made him completely regard literature as the path of life.
In the first years of Stetson's writing, he asked a writer friend what was his motivation for writing?
The writer friend replied, "For my mother, to make her proud." ”
Shi Tie sheng then reflected on his motivation for writing and found that he also had such a desire, and this desire accounted for a large proportion.
To make his mother proud, he kept writing.
He used pen and paper to collide with a path in the newspapers and periodicals, began to win awards, became famous, and slowly went to the vast world.
Writing became his reason for living, the way he existed.
In those dark days, words healed his wounds.
Writing is the spiritual sustenance of his physical pain, and it is also his unwavering belief in life.
Eventually, writing rescued him from his disability.
Writer Ding Ling once said:
"People, as long as they have a belief and pursue, they can endure any hardships and adapt to any environment."
The worst enemy of life is the lack of firm conviction.
The biggest nemesis of the dilemma is to have a firm belief.
Only by having firm convictions can we break the situation.
Write at the end
Shi Tiesheng's life was full of disasters and difficulties.
He was in a wheelchair at the age of twenty-one and was diagnosed with uremia at the age of forty-seven.
While enduring the pain of dialysis, he worked tirelessly.
In all the difficult and difficult moments, what sustains him is the desire and unyielding belief in writing.
Some people say that it was the tribulations that made Stetson great.
But tribulations are wealth for the powerful, arsenic for the cowardly.
Stetson is the former, and his life is not so much a life of fighting against tribulations as a life of faith.
At the trough, the faith does not fall, and life has the possibility of climbing the peak again.
As Nietzsche put it:
"Whoever cannot destroy me will make me strong."
Those who can cross life are always those who are willing to cross themselves.
If the faith does not change, the time to fall into the trough is also the time to rise.
Click "Watching", may each of us be able to firmly believe in the trough, grit our teeth and persevere, and bottom out.
Author | On the string
Column Director | Come slowly
Typography | Zheng to the north
Music | Touching moments